Adham Nu'man - 2013-05-22 "This is a student presenting her boring art and nothing interesting at all is going to happen, let's film it!"

Hooker - 2013-05-22 Yeah. Normally, I'm right with you. But people are pretty much filming everything now, so who knows? I'm five-starring the spot-on vapid self-absorbed vlog of her opening remarks, which is good if it's fake and great if it's not.

Maru - 2013-05-22 They may have already known she was prone to outbursts.

Never seen an art classroom with nice hardwood floors, that doesn't go well with paint, and given half the time people working in oil are bringing it in wet, that seems a bad place to be. Looks more like... Well, a drama classroom.

It sounds like everyone is giving shitty improv, nobody reacts to the freak out. Everyone sounds like a bad impression of an art student.

I've seen art reviews before and step 1 is putting it on an easel to display, not holding it in hands.

So it's probably not real, or it seems amazingly fake to me, having seen in class crits before, including ones where people broke down when I was chilling at the art college with friends and decided to sit in instead of waiting for their class to end. Could be real, it just seems way too fake..

baleen - 2013-05-22 Inclined to believe you, but they are still probably art students. This can be reviled on many levels.

That guy - 2013-05-22 I think if you watch her from about 2:10 to her exit, she seems like she's waiting for her line, and her transition from not talking to angry is unbelievable. What sets her off shouldn't really set someone off. I'm giving it 4 stars for being pretty good bullshit.

I'm not sure I'd call it shitty improv, in that it's a decent attempt to deceive, not entertain. They could have said things, wanting to be funny, that would have been huge giveaways that it's staged. They didn't.

I'd be pretty surprised if this is real, but I wouldn't say it's impossible. There's a chance that she's a histrionic nut job with blunted affects at the same time.

snothouse - 2013-05-22 You are right - it may be an act - but I will also say, having gone to art school, that I have seen people (normally people taking classes as an elective outside their major, as this girl is supposed to be) flip out on a dime due to volatile mix of insecurity and immaturity.

sosage - 2013-05-22 Even if fake, it is accurate based off of my time at a "more expensive than it should have been" art college. The whole, "I'm going to just go against what you taught me/I put this big red line here that looks cool and like it is making a statement but it isn't/I am freaking the fuck out because I was up for X nights straight making this shit for an art class I am not majoring in" is painfully accurate. As are the student's forced constructive critiques for the sake of earning participation points.

Old_Zircon - 2013-05-22 I've sat in on graduate classes at Mass Art. These people are too eloquent be real art students.

Mike Jordan - 2013-05-23 To play Devil's Advocate, I think this video without any context may seem staged, but the things they are saying to her seem targeted at her specifically.

I don't have trouble imagining a scenario where they have not so subtly hinted to this girl that they dislike her, and have taken this opportunity to take shots at her in the guise of art criticism.

"You could have worked a lot harder" "Yeah, i think it looks a lot like under-worked outsider art ... and you were kind of like successful in a way because you were trying to pretend you didn't learn how to paint .... and it's often like people who are inmates and crazy and stuff" "I think the face looks like you, and you do a lot of art that is like focused on you"

They all seem, like, very passive aggressive and like, I still dislike them all.

Even the seemingly premeditated meltdown seems believable given that it's not a stretch that this girl had decided two people in that she was going to show these jerks what for and was only waiting for the perfect moment.

themilkshark - 2013-05-23 I don't think it's a fake. I've seen this critique a million times before in art school. It usually doesn't end so dramatically, but this girl was attempting to avoid embarrassment and ended up super embarrassed. She didn't use any art techniques and admitted to it, used only primary colors out of the tube, and calls it gestural when it's a static flat head floating in a sea of blank canvas. The other students are making valid points, except that dumb one who talks about the red eye cover.

The student filmed this because she basically brought 45 minutes of rushed bullshit to class while everyone else probably had to paint a still life.

Nominal - 2013-05-23 Has anyone ever got anything out of peer review in a creative class? Dude, we're here because we DON'T know. Most of the time it's students being quiet because they don't want to hurt anyone's feelings. The rest is just unhelpful feedback.

Suedeo - 2013-05-24 I share Mike Jordan's feelings on this clip. Well said!

robotkarateman - 2013-05-25 I've been in classes with this woman. The reason the rest of the class are targeting their criticism at her personally is because she's an attention whore who thrives on being "in your face" about her "art" and probably walked into the class room with a chip on her shoulder the first day. She's far more talented and creative than the "ordinary" people in this class, and she can't deal with the fact that these nobodies not only can't accept her brilliance but get to openly criticize her. It's, like, so unfair.

I've heard the whole "I tried to do everything I was taught not to do because I'm a rebel, Dotty" speech in so many of the art class I've taken that I can usually finish their sentences for them.

Mother_Puncher - 2013-05-22 A friend of mine invited me to an art thing one time and it was a bunch of absolute bullshit. His art was drunk shit he drew that was awful and made no sense other than to be random and vulgar. Another guy welded some shit to other shit. Some guy took some pictures of something and did nothing with them. Some jerk brought a blank canvas and forgot to paint a painting. One guy was stupid enough to use white paint one a white canvas so it looked blank.

Im not friends with any of those people anymore and I stop talking to people who invite me to anything with the word "art" or "cultural" in it. Art is bullshit.

I would rather be without it, for there is a queer small utility in it.

You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon.

Nominal - 2013-05-22 Hee hee. If you're up around Boston, check out the Contemporary Art Museum for some truly bullshit art. Be sure to go on Thursday nights when it's free.

Stuff I saw there during their "art of the 80s" exhibit:

-A painting that looked like a bunch of tangled spaghetti. The description called it “Simultaneously phallic and vaginal, oral and anal, pre and post gender”.

-A TV setup to loop an old public access segment. A 10 minute video clip of a guy mixing paint while another guy crouched under the table sobbing under a blanket. That’s it. Description called it a statement on the artists childhood traumas with art.

-A male figure made up of brown egg cartons and pipe cleaners. Each body part had a factoid of the artist written in marker. The penis was a glued on dildo with the writing “Native American penises are larger and more colorful”.

-A giant painting of a guy holding a postage stamp. Description called it “a statement on marginalization of artists via commodification as represented by rising postage costs”.

-A bank of eight TVs all showing current news. The artist’s contribution? Taping a written phrase over each TV: “poverty”, “third world instability”, “genocide”. I think he was making a STATEMENT. Description praised it as “masterfully manipulating a medium that is itself manipulation”.

-A photographer whose entire career was taking pictures of famous paintings, then displaying 1:1 scale prints as her own “photograph”. Description called it “a genius outside the box perspective that challenges the very concepts of originality and authenticity.

Adham Nu'man - 2013-05-22 Last time I was in a modern art museum there was a lot of stuff that seemed like useless rubbish to me, but there was also a huge wall made of dead flies, all black and silvery it looked absolutely amazing, like some type of alien metal technology.

Then there was this huge scale model with little cute European villages and towns and hundreds of miniatures of the corpses of jewish zombies that had risen and were attacking nazis, who were fleeing in terror as they got disemboweled and their heads were spiked onto white picket fences.

The moral of the story is: even if you're a dumbass ignoramus like me, expose yourself to art, you might enjoy it.

Old_Zircon - 2013-05-22 I saw the wall of dead flies, it's really good. There's a lot of good contemporary art; most of what makes it to museums isn't the best of what's out there. Museums are the graveyards of relevance.

Old_Zircon - 2013-05-22 When in Maryland, be sure to see the American Visionary Art Museum; it's basically the PoE of art. It's got the full collection of work by that guy who build instruments and lifesize figures out of wooden matches dyed and arranged in patterns that encode his personal theology in a language he invented, and a bunch of big, extremely detailed paintings of scenes from Revelations painted by an auto mechanic who had a psychotic break, quit his job and taught himself to paint, and a canvas about 50 feet long that the artist spent his whole life painting, that is a mural of the entire history of life on earth done in tiny, detailed figures that become the individual dots in a pointalist painting of a reclining nude figure if you stand far away from it, and three more stories of stuff. When I was there they had a documentary film and room sized installaton by an elderly woman who had buit herself an entire family out of cardboard and performed with them alone in her house for decades. I bet they have the collection of that guy in New York who invented a music career for himself and spent his whole life hand painting imaginary albums by his imaginary band.

Better than than the Louvre; those guys didn't even do their own paintings most of the time.

Old_Zircon - 2013-05-22 The problem with art school is the problem with pretty much all higher education in theb US in the last 30 years, which is that it has become a tax free for-profit enterprise that makes the bulk of its profit on freshman enrollment, and just needs to manage to retain enough satisfied (by giving them good grades andnot making them work that hard) students to keep their ratings and enrollment up. there are exceptions, and there are genuinely good faculty out there still, but they're swimming against the tide.

M-DEEM - 2013-05-23 “Simultaneously phallic and vaginal, oral and anal, pre and post gender” is now part of my cover letter. Thanks!

Redford - 2013-05-23 In my mom's old gallery, there was this ONE ARTIST who was constantly complaining about how their work never sold. It consisted of tiny black and white photographs of mundane objects mounted on over sized rag paper backings. The price tag for these was often 0 or more for a single picture like this.

Nominal - 2013-05-23 Sorry, I meant the Institute of Contemporary or (the ICA). Get drunk, bring a friend Thursday night, have a contest to see who breaks down into snorts and giggles first either at the art or the fedora hipster scarves discussing how fabulous the emperor's new gown is.

Old_Zircon - 2013-05-23 I've seen really good stuff at the ICA but that was years ago when it was in that little firehouse across from the Hynes Convention Center. I have a feeling they've gone down hill since they moved to the big, fancy, expensive new location.